Dating your mom ian frazier full text

It’s almost as if you subvert the whole authorial-expectations game.Each time you sort of negotiate a new contract with the reader, a means of tackling a subject in depth without setting yourself up as an authority. For some reason, when I feel I am becoming an expert, I sabotage the whole thing.IF: Usually, what comes out is so far before the writing of it. IF: I don’t know how you would actually characterize that. In your family history, when you get to the present day—to the point you could start talking in terms of “I”—you intentionally shift into the collective noun.

I think there must be something very comforting and powerful about it, because you simply can’t eradicate it from America. In you go looking for the legacy of Crazy Horse and you find a newer legacy that seems to be gathering power, that of the late teenage athlete Su Anne Big Crow. When I look back on that I realize that I was so hyped-out by dealing with the drunkenness and the misery of the reservation that when I came across somebody that I had no doubt was good, it was just like a life preserver. BLVR: Have you noticed how so many people have this comforting little family myth that they have a Native American ancestor tucked in there somewhere on the family tree? And in the movie Pocahontas falls in love with John Smith.Did you feel like you had to kind of sidle around it, deadpan up to it? What you’re feeling is so strong that you don’t even have that much of your brain left to judge: is this kind of corny or not? BLVR: There’s a mental fusion between Pocahontas and Sacagawea, too.IF: Yeah, and you notice it’s much easier done, somehow, with a woman. Somebody has said that if you ask who the ancestor was, it’s very often an Indian “princess.” BLVR: It seems like white American culture needs to stop mythologizing Native Americans, and yet Native Americans need to grasp for new cultural ideals, like Su Anne Big Crow.Your central fascination is with her and her actions during a particular basketball game, which you point out as an act of heroism. That’s a word that seems infused with corniness, but it’s really what you’re talking about. Around Su Anne there is a lot of myth, and also there’s a kind of high on the reservation, and it’s almost the kind of culture of the funeral. And the grief of it is so real that whether it’s corny or kitsch or what is just beside the point. So you have to say, “Our continent loves me.” There’s a Robert Frost poem, something like “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” And that’s a way of saying “We are the land, the land loves us.When you felt inspired by that, did you think that if you wrote about it in a straightforward fashion, it might come across as New Age treacle of the first order? IF: Yeah, I guess I just suspended my disbelief there. What is actually felt here—I don’t care how you express it, you know? The people who were here already think we’re great.” It’s a complete fantasy but somehow it’s very powerful and very comforting.